Will Fed-Up Angry Liberals Make “Straw Dogs” Remake a Success?

Will Fed-Up Angry Liberals Make "Straw Dogs" Remake a Success?

If the American political landscape of the last few years have confirmed anything, it’s that the right-wing is full of bullies, racists and attempted assassins, and the left-wing is a bunch of pansies and pushovers, more willing to cave into the country’s reigning conservative mentality.

But angry leftists, who have had enough of Obama’s reasoned attempts at diplomacy and realpolitik, now have an outlet in which to fight back: Rod Lurie’s refashioning of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 classic “Straw Dogs” is a rape-revenge fantasy for irate liberals everywhere, where the effete intellectual screenwriter gets to brutally destroy a bunch of beer-guzzling, football-watching, pickup-driving Dixie-loving Southerners with nail guns and bear traps.

Sony’s genre arm Screen Gems, however, has a unique contradiction they must confront in releasing the film this weekend: Effete intellectuals, presumably the film’s target audience, don’t see poorly reviewed, violent revenge fantasies. If they do end up turning out in droves, however, maybe that’ll serve as a warning to the Tea Party. Watch out: liberals are mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

For further support for such an idea, Bobcat Goldthwait’s “God Bless America,” which I reviewed in Toronto, suggests a similar leftist brand of bloody wish-fulfillment.